( The Washington Post ) - The Pentagon said that the radio threat to bomb U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf last weekend may not have come from the five Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats that approached them - and may not even have been intended against U.S. targets.
The communication Sunday was made on radio channel 16, a common marine frequency used by ships and others in the region. "It could have been a threat aimed at some other nation or a myriad of other things," said Rear Adm. Frank Thorp IV, a spokesman for the Navy.
In the radio message recorded by the Navy, a heavily accented voice said, "I am coming to you. You will explode after a few minutes." But Farsi speakers and Iranians told The Washington Post that the accent did not sound Iranian.
In part because of the threatening language, the United States has elevated the encounter into an international incident. Twice this week, President Bush criticized Iran's behavior as provocative and warned of "serious consequences" if it happens again. He is due to head Friday to the Gulf, where containing Iran is expected to be a major theme of his talks in five oil-rich sheikdoms.
Pentagon officials insist that they never claimed Iran made the threat. "No one in the military has said that the transmission emanated from those boats. But when they hear it simultaneously to the behavior of those boats, it only adds to the tension," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell. "If this verbal threat emanated from something or someone unrelated to the five boats, it would not lessen the threat from those boats."
The warning was picked up on a bridge-to-bridge communication received by many ships in the region some seven minutes after the five Iranian patrol boats first appeared on the horizon, Thorp said. The main threat, Pentagon officials said, was the way the five patrol boats swarmed erratically around the USS Port Royal, an Aegis cruiser, and an accompanying frigate and destroyer, and then dropped small white box-like items in the water.
"When you get a bridge-to-bridge call you have no way of knowing where it came from," Thorp said. "Nobody ever with any certainty knew it was from them. But it did escalate it up a notch as it was happening at the same time" that the patrol boats manned by Revolutionary Guards engaged in menacing behavior, Thorp said.
Yet the Pentagon has consistently given the impression that the threat was linked to the Iranian boats.
"This is more serious because of the aggregate of the actions, the coordinated movement of the ships, the boats, the aggressive maneuvering, the more or less simultaneous radio communication, the dropping of objects ... So yes, it's more serious than we have seen," Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, said at a new briefing Monday.
The Pentagon's audio tape of the warning was also released Tuesday with the video tape in an abridged four-minute package of the incident, which U.S. officials said lasted between 20 and 30 minutes. The U.S. ships were within seconds of opening fire on the five Iranian speedboats when they turned and headed toward Iran, Pentagon officials said.
The radio threat was merely a "sideshow" to the physical threat, a senior U.S. official familiar with the incident said. "What was the command and control mechanism here? Was Tehran aware of what they were doing? They made these provocative moves. The radio was a sideshow to the event," he said.
To further challenge the U.S. version, Iran Thursday released what it claimed was an abridged video of the same incident, which shows a calm exchange. "Slowly get a little closer ... can't make out the ship number," says a Revolutionary Guardsman on a small Iranian patrol boat, speaking in Farsi. "I hear something being announced from its loudspeakers, what is it saying? I think they're talking to us."
"Which channel?" says a second Iranian. "Coalition warship 73," he says, speaking in English through his radio mike. "This Iranian navy patrol boat. Request side number ... operating in the area this time."
An American ship radios back. "This is coalition warship 73. I read you loud and clear."
The five-minute video, released Thursday by Iranian television, offers no indication of the tensions that supposedly sparked the weekend encounter between U.S. and Iranian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz - and no intention of an attack. The Pentagon said it does not dispute anything in the Iranian video.
In Tehran, Revolutionary Guards Brig. General Ali Fadavi charged that the United States was creating a "media fuss," the Fars News Agency reported. He said the Iranian goal was to obtain registration numbers that had been unreadable.
The U.S. presence in the Gulf's international waters is a sensitive issue in Iran because the USS Vincennes, another Aegis cruiser, in 1988 shot down an Iranian passenger plane, killing all 290 on board. The United States at first claimed it was a warplane and then said that it was outside the civilian air corridor and did not respond to radio calls. Both were untrue, and the radio calls were made on a military frequencies that the airliner did not have. A subsequent investigation showed the U.S. ship was off course.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the new Iranian video does not refute the U.S. version. "Simply choosing not to reveal the careless and reckless actions in this video does not change the facts from what took place," he said in an e-mail.
The United States Thursday sent an official protest to Tehran through Switzerland, while Defense Secretary Robert Gates charged that Iran had acted aggressively. "What concerned us was first the fact that there were five of these boats and, second, that they came as close as they did to our ships and behaved in a pretty aggressive manner," he told a press conference.
Citing former Defense Secretary William Cohen, Gates said, "Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes? I think that aptly characterizes and appropriately characterizes, the Iranian claim."